


i felt it when i passed you

by limerental



Series: Yenralt Valentines [3]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesiac Yennefer, Ban Ard Professor Geralt, Episode: s01e05 Bottled Appetites, F/M, Mage Geralt, background orgy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29121105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Geralt and Yennefer's adolescent romance in the midst of studying to be mages is abruptly ended when Yennefer chooses to sacrifice her memory of Geralt in order to ascend, leaving Geralt in turn to give up his feelings for her in order to cope. Decades on, both have found themselves disillusioned with their separate lives until Geralt is given the task of tracking down a rogue mage causing trouble in Rinde.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: Yenralt Valentines [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2136729
Comments: 4
Kudos: 47
Collections: A Very Yenralt Valentine





	i felt it when i passed you

**Author's Note:**

> written for the A Very Yenralt Valentines event

_There is a rogue mage making quite a stink in Rinde_ , said the Council as he stood at the cusp of their circle. As a young adept, Geralt had thought the grand robes and high-backed chairs and ornate room lent them an air of wizened nobility. Now, he had lived and worked among them for too long and knew that nothing truly noble had ever been conceived in these halls in the centuries since the establishment of the Brotherhood of Sorcerers.

_Bring this mage to heel, Geralt. Before something more unfortunate occurs._

The Council’s eyes were beady and sharp. Their bony fingers creaked on the armrests of their chairs.

Geralt ducked his head and accepted his orders. It could be no coincidence that he had been chosen to retrieve the mage. His position as an instructor at Ban Ard did not make him the ideal candidate for such a venture, but his mind had been fraught and anxious of late, seeing clearly the web of corruption around this place, unsure of his own place in it.

The Council wished to bring him to heel as well. Force him to see that the world beyond the Brotherhood was a bleak and dangerous existence for a mage, and barring that realization, something unfortunate would no doubt occur.

Geralt was tired. It had been many years since he felt much of anything at all, his long years of study giving to long years of teaching minor subjects to Ban Ard boys. He did not keep friends and did not indulge in the excess his fellows preferred. He kept to his barren quarters on the upper floor of the dormitory and read dusty books and drank dry, red wine.

He thought sometimes what his life could have been. Had he chosen to be a court mage instead and flirt with power and endure the company of royals. Had the School of the Wolf not discovered his magical aptitude and sold him before he could be mutated in the way of their own adepts. Had his mother loved him. Instead, he had studied here and ascended into this grey, flat life.

He could have refused to go to Rinde and made it less of a hassle. Been charged with contempt of the Council and met his fate head on.

He grit his teeth and went.

In Rinde, he followed a trail of illicit magical services to the manor house of the mayor himself. Most of the dealings seemed the work of an ambitious hedge witch rather than a devious and dangerous rogue mage, dealing in abortifacients and wart removal and cures for erectile dysfunction.

But the manor house sang with magic, warping with color along the edge of the horizon, and Geralt urged his mare to a canter. He was met at the gate by a burly guard who quickly forgot his request for payment and obediently trotted off to stable his mare.

The hallways of the house blurred with fog. The enchantment was akin to a heady liquor, loosening inhibitions and warming the skin. He could ignore it easily, stepping through the barriers the rogue mage had set up and following the heat and pulse of the working to its center.

The room hummed and fizzled, naked bodies lost in throes of passion writhing on every surface. Their thoughts were a quick patter of _more yes please fuck yes more_ , their eyes rolling in their heads and bodies on fire.

Geralt stepped around them, ignoring the tugs on his cloak, the hands that tried to sneak between his legs.

The rogue mage sat at the head of the room, dark as an inkblot with shrewd eyes that glittered beneath the cowl of a webbed mask.

He knew her at once, would have known her anywhere.

His cold heart burned colder. He knew why the Council had sent him here. He understood the true depths of this test.

She was meant to be dead. She was long dead.

“Yennefer,” he said, his tone as flat and vacant as he felt.

“Ah, my reputation precedes me,” said Yennefer and leaned against her crossed legs, peering down at him with no spark of recognition. “Who sent you? Tissaia? I assume you are here to chastise me.”

Her red lips pulled down in a pout as she met the barrier of his thoughts, unable to sink her claws in.

Geralt remembered the taste of those lips, her scent, the softness of her skin. He remembered a crooked girl, fierce and violet-eyed, remembered her anger and her lust for power. How insatiable she had been, how determined, how stubborn. She had spun on him their last night together and told him plainly that her path required sacrifice.

The parts of her that remembered him had been burned away to create the alluring, timeless beauty that she was now.

Geralt remembered her beauty in peasant’s garb with poorly-shorn hair. He remembered the tremble of her crooked jaw beneath the touch of his fingers, the blue veins of her closed eyes. She had been beautiful then, surely.

It was a small mercy, though it was not typical for adepts of his chosen path, that he too had been offered a chance for sacrifice. To cut out the parts of him that loved her.

He remembered their time together with the distance of a hazy dream. How beautiful she had been. How she had sighed when he kissed her. How the touch of her hands had felt against his waist.

But there was nothing but a black void as he looked at her now. A vacuum of empty space. Bleak and colorless.

Yes, this order from the Council had been a test. No doubt for the both of them.

She strode to him, circling, a finger lifted to trail down his slender arm. He wondered how he looked to her eyes, whether this attention was due to any small spark of recognition. He was a tall man, pale-skinned and freckled, his long auburn hair combed back and held loosely at the base of his skull. What did she see that made her eyes brighten like that as she drew close?

“Well?” she said against the skin of his throat, leaning her warm body against his chest. “Will you get on with it then?”

“With what?” he asked. Her small hand cupped the back of his neck, entangling in his hair.

“With chastising me,” said Yennefer.

Geralt could use the opening she had given him to follow his orders. Hold her against him and portal her before the Council for her trial. It would be easy. The safest option. He remembered the forlorn ache of her loss like a faded echo that he could not quite reach to touch. To stretch himself thin to brush against it would destroy him, would light his mind on fire, would end every hope of a comfortable and dull existence reading dusty books and drinking wine in his barren quarters in Ban Ard’s dormitory.

This was what the Council had hoped to show him, that his quiet, simple, predictable life would be far preferable to the rage and chaos and agony of Yennefer’s rejection of him. That he should be grateful and slink back to them humbled and with new purpose.

Geralt knew that he would fail the test even before he ducked his head to kiss her.

The hollow in his chest erupted, and he felt the thrum of released magic warp the air around them. Yennefer’s enchantment snapped, and the naked gathering suddenly felt the cold and embarrassing exposure.

But Yennefer did not notice.

“Geralt?” she whispered against his lips, her palms pressing against the hinge of his jaw. Her chin wobbled, and Geralt ached and ached, a red-hot fissure of grief and hurt and love for her that did not waver, refused to dull. He admired her, worried for her, desired her. It crashed over him like a boiling wave.

“Yen,” he breathed, knowing she could feel the chaos in his mind, his walls torn down to allow her inside.

“Oh Geralt,” she said and kissed him with the sweetness of their fumbling youth and kissed him again with a familiar ferocity that threatened to rend him at the seams. Her cheeks were wet when he dared to touch them. Her own volatile emotions lashed against his. “I made the wrong choice, Geralt. I regretted it every day.”

“You couldn’t have,” he said, voice rough. “You didn’t remember me.”

“I remembered enough. I remembered that my life could have been something more. I needed it to be something more. I’ve spent the last decades trying to make it so.”

“Did you?” asked Geralt. “Make it something more?”

He saw it all unspool as her mind opened to him, the life she had indulged in since abandoning the shackles of the Brotherhood. She had carved a life for herself slithering in the cracks of society, taking advantage where she could, offering help where she could. She lived a life brimming with pleasure and revelry that Geralt in his dull and drab existence could never have imagined.

She had had an endless spill of lovers, had engaged in sex acts that pinked his cheeks with their deviancy, had sampled substances that warped the very fiber of her reality, and had had no shortage of luxuriant lodgings and bountiful feasts.

Surely, that had been enough. Surely, the life she had carved for herself had no need for him, had eclipsed him, had surpassed anything he had to offer.

“No,” said Yennefer, a thumb stroking along his parted lips as she stood on tiptoes to hold his face in her hands. “Not until this moment.”

With a tentative flicker of hope, his chest aching, he offered her a sun-warmed glimpse of the future he had always envisioned. A cottage farmstead. Their children. The glow of the hearth.

She laughed just as she had years ago when he first whispered his dream to her, but rather than rebuke and cast him aside as she had then, she kissed him slow and deep and purposeful.

And made a different choice.


End file.
